Fifteen years ago, you weren't a participant in the digital age unless you had your own homepage. Even in the late 1990s, services abounded to make personal pages easy to build and deployâthe most famous is the now-defunct GeoCities, but there were many others (remember Angelfire and Tripod?). These were the days before the "social" Web, before MySpace and Facebook.
Instant messaging was in its infancy and creating an online presence required no small familiarity with HTML (though automated Web design programs did exist).